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Ball-Noques Studio

You are looking at Double back to Basics, an installation project by Ball-Noques studio, who are a collaborative design and fabrication studio producing architecture, art and industrial objects. The piece was made for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) off-site gallery at the Charles W. White School, and is essentially a heap of brightly colored, light-weight letters mimicking the aesthetic of classic fridge-magnets. The story and fabrication process is so in-depth though that you should without hesitation allow yourself a peruse through their superb ‘process’ section on the project, rather than let me butcher it here.

World renowned sculptor Anish Kapoor has joined forces with director Daniel Kramer and conductor Edward Gardner in a new production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. The ENO plays host to Kapoor’s monumental set design, which features striking colours and bold shapes. Wagner’s operatic masterpiece tells the legend of Tristan and Isolde’s ill-fated love story and Kapoor’s use of scale provides a mythic setting. Kapoor’s unique approach and aesthetic has been blended with the dramatic score of Wagner to form an extraordinary production.

Photographer Jess Bonham and set designer Anna Lomax’s latest project skirts around the edges of suggestion, titillation and innuendo in a series of still life images that abstractly explore taboo leisure pursuits. The idea came from an unexpected email from Anna’s neighbour: “It was posted out to the tenants of Anna’s building and was an apology about a previous ‘client’ from this woman’s sideline dominatrix business causing some havoc in the building one weekend,” explains Jess. “Anna had no idea she was a dominatrix as her day job is far more conservative!”

“We do it in public” is the proud mission statement of Moment Factory, a Montreal-based new media and entertainment studio that creates some of the most specialised multimedia environments in the world. From transforming Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcleona into a morphing, melting son et lumiere show to providing Arcade Fire, Jay-Z and the Nine Inch Nails with jaw dropping stage shows or permanent interactive artworks for LAX airport, the studio has established a global reputation for creating memorable experiences. Moment Factory’s 160-strong team of designers, directors, illustrators, architects, programmers, engineers and developers continually push the envelope of what is possible and what can be believed. “What we strive to do is create experiences that are relevant enough that people will be moved to go to and visit them,” says founder and creative director Sakchin Bessette. “It could be a rock show, a public space or a forest. It needs to be surprising. New technologies and new types of storytelling let us create new entertainments and experiences. We want to create goosebumps and memorable experiences.”

Photography is rarely an honest medium, particularly in the delectable yet deceitful world of food photography. To make things look delicious, photographers and art directors have many a trick up their sleeves, and set designer and art director Sandy Suffield has decided to fling open the doors and reveal the tricks of the trade. In the series Faking It, she worked with photographer Dan Matthews and food stylist Jack Sargeson to create a body of work that manages to both subvert and comply with the nuances of high-end food shots.

Like the Cher of the set design world, Elise needs just the one name. That quiet confidence may seem arrogant, but that’s until you see the work and it’s beautiful pastel shades of otherworldly brilliance. We assumed at first they were computer generated renders, but lo, they are in fact carefully constructed sculptures that have been commissioned for clients including The New York Times Magazine and Wallpaper*. Another sublime characteristic of Elise’s work is in its ability to appear at once digital and organic, as forms curve around one another. This is most apparent in Pink Love, which Elise describes as boasting “pink curvaceousness.” She adds: “Its fleshy corporeal forms press and push against the edges of its circular plinth; both plinth and final photograph of the work questioning the boundaries of its sculptural space.”

Perched on a toilet that’s apparently been belching out neon nuclear waste, I look around me at the massive talking cat, the gloriously bountiful and bright flora and the flashing stars. It’s like being at the theatre, but falling down the stairs, on acid.